Tatiana Trouvé’s One Day for Eternity is on view at the König Gallery in Berlin through July 8. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. In this piece, Trouvé continues her exploration of memory, material, and space. The work is the most recent installation in a series entitled Les Indéfinis, which addresses the myriad transformations that an artwork undergoes, morphing from an idea into material, from material into an object of circulation.

As a jumping off point for this installation series, the artist cites her frustration with the difficulty of obtaining the loan of her own works for exhibition. The result is a series of works that evade capture and occupy liminal space. This space “emerges less from the realm of theory than the intuitive and fantastical space of fiction,” according to the press release. The works seem only tentatively linked to the physical space they occupy and the material of which they are composed.

The intention to unsettle, upset, or evade the material possession that comes to define the circulation of the art object comes through clearly in this work, immediately striking for the delicate play of wire, plexiglass, and negative space it reveals. The delicate metal supports of varying heights grow out of cement or marble bases, and surround a plexiglass reproduction of a giant shipping crate.

The metal structures reference implements for the display of artifacts in anthropological and ethnological contexts. In their current function, they are devoid of purpose and serve to frame the absence implied by the labels attached to them. These labels refer to the works in Trouvés own oeuvre, citing the title, date, and inventory number of an individual work. Some of these works actually exist, and some are fictitious or have yet to be made. In this way, the piece encircles the imaginary and invisible power of the collection, a sort of topography of memory that forms the rift between what is real and what is imagined, anticipated, or projected.

Trouvé is known for her works that skirt this boundary between the real and the envisioned, especially through architectural construction and poetic mimesis. One Day for Eternity continues this investigation into structures or architecture that can activate mechanisms of remembering and forgetting, giving form to the immaterial echoes of the past through collection and gesture.